Short: Why climate change gets the silent treatment. Next on Moyers & Company

Long: Even as sadness turns to outrage over the Newtown tragedy, and powerful coalitions of leaders and celebrities speak out, those who value guns over lives continue unfazed and unabated. On the next Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill reports on how the NRA and gun merchants continue to strong-arm Congress and state legislatures into keeping any and all discussion of sensible gun control off the table.

Also on the show, remember climate change? For the first time since 1984, the issue didn’t even come up in a presidential debate. But bringing climate change back into our national conversation is as much a communications challenge as it is a scientific one. Scientist Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, joins Bill to describe his efforts to do what even Hurricane Sandy couldn’t -- galvanize communities over what’s arguably the greatest single threat facing humanity. Leiserowitz, who specializes in the psychology of risk perception, knows better than anyone if people are willing to change their behavior to make a difference.

Moyers & Company #151 "Rewriting the Story of America"RELEASE DATE: December 28, 2012

Short: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz straddles two cultures while telling the story of America’s past and future. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: The life and work of Junot Díaz contains many worlds -- and that makes him all the more worth listening to. His books, including National Book Award finalist This Is How You Lose Her and Pulitzer Prize-winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, journey between the old and the new, and between the America that was and the America we’re becoming. Born in the Dominican Republic, but raised in New Jersey and American to the core, Junot Díaz is a spotter of the future, a curator of the past, a man of the here-and-now.

Díaz joins Bill Moyers on the next Moyers & Company (check local listings) to discuss the evolution of the great American story. Along the way he offers funny and perceptive insights into his own work, as well Star Wars, Moby Dick, and America’s inevitable shift to a majority minority country.

“There is an enormous gap between the way the country presents itself and imagines itself and projects itself, and the reality of this country,” Díaz tells Bill. “Whether we're talking about the Latino community in North Carolina, a whole new progressive generation of Cuban Americans in Florida, a very out queer community across the United States, or an enormous body of young voters who are either ignored or pandered to, I think we're having a new country emerging that's been in the making for a long time, and that I think for the first time is revealing itself more fully to the entire country.”

Short: Tony Kushner on what we still can learn from Lincoln. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: One reason so many people are disillusioned by the state of things in America -- even more so after the terror in Newtown -- is that our political system hasn't produced consistently good results in a long time. We’ve forgotten that democracy is supposed to be about addressing our problems through a political system that encourages bargaining, compromise, and progress. Except for taking us to war, showering largesse on the privileged and powerful, and courting donors instead of representing voters, Washington politics promotes gridlock, paralysis, and stalemate.

But Bill Moyers points to a new ray of hope -- not in politics, but in theaters: the movie Lincoln. On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner, who wrote the film’s screenplay, joins Bill for a “history lesson about politics.” The two talk about finding the man inside the monument, and what Abraham Lincoln -- 147 years after his death -- can still teach us all about politics, compromise, and the survival of American democracy.

“The job of the president is both to make the compromises necessary to actually have things happen in a democracy, which means compromising at a slower pace than anybody would necessarily like,” Kushner tells Bill. “At the same time he has to keep telling us where we're going, what we're trying to arrive at. And I think that Obama has done an astonishing job of doing that over and over, of reminding us that government is a good thing, and that we share responsibility for one another because without that shared responsibility our own lives are destroyed.”

"You will be reminded that politics can be made to work for the good of the country,” says Bill of the show. “It could even help us reduce the violence in America and make more Newtown tragedies less likely."

Also on the show, Bill reflects on the elementary school shooting in Connecticut and its implications for our culture.

Short: Why the fiscal cliff is merely a phantom menace -- and what we should be talking about instead. Next on Moyers & Company

Long: When it comes to America’s economic health, all anyone seems to talk about is the “fiscal cliff,” and the perils of our inevitable plunge. But media’s favorite metaphor is distracting us from actual and crucial fiscal realities. On the next Moyers & Company (check local listings), independent political and economic analysts Bruce Bartlett and Yves Smith join Bill in a discussion that’s become as rare as it is necessary -- why are Washington insiders talking about the deficit crisis and not the jobs crisis?

Bartlett, former advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, got into hot water with fellow conservatives when he aired concerns about the direction of their ideology and wrote critically of the second George Bush. His most recent book is The Benefit and The Burden: Tax Reform -- Why We Need It, and What It Will Take. Yves Smith, who spent more than 25 years in the financial services industry, is the founder and editor of the popular blog Naked Capitalism, and runs a successful management consulting firm.

Following the conversation, Bill shares his perspective on one of the most corrupt D.C. fixtures -- the revolving door between Washington leadership and lobbying. That lucrative pathway ensures that “when push comes to shove, corporate interests will have the upper hand in the close calls that determine public policy… no matter which party is in power.”

Finally on the broadcast, poet and former publishing executive James Autry joins Bill to talk about issues of art and of heart. He shares his poems with Bill and discusses his and his wife Sally's challenging but inspiring experience raising their autistic child.

Short: How the FCC is poised to help Big Media seize more control over your airwaves. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: In 1983, 50 corporations controlled a majority of American media. Now that number is six. And Big Media may get even bigger, thanks to the FCC’s consideration of ending a rule preventing companies from owning a newspaper and radio and TV stations in the same big city. Such a move would give these massive media companies free rein to devour more of the competition, control the public message, and also limit diversity across the media landscape. On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Senator Bernie Sanders, one of several Senators who have written FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski asking him to suspend the plan, joins Bill to discuss why Big Media is a threat to democracy and what citizens can do to fight back.

Also on the show, former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards shares his perspective on the fiscal cliff debate, the influence of tax pledger Grover Norquist, and why both political parties require radical change. Edwards chaired the Republican Policy Committee, was a founding trustee of the conservative Heritage Foundation, and served as National Chairman of the American Conservative Union.

Finally, Bill Moyers offers his own perspective on why there's more to Norquist’s unusual pledge than ideology or principle.

Revealing the hidden world of ALEC -- corporations and state legislators colluding to write laws and remake America, one statehouse at a time.

In an encore broadcast this weekend (check local listings), Moyers & Company presents “United States of ALEC,” a report on the most influential corporate-funded political force most of America has never heard of — ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. A national consortium of state politicians and powerful corporations, ALEC presents itself as a “nonpartisan public-private partnership”. But behind that mantra lies a vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to increase corporate profits at public expense without public knowledge.

In state houses around the country, hundreds of pieces of boilerplate ALEC legislation are proposed or enacted that would, among other things, dilute collective bargaining rights, make it harder for some Americans to vote, and limit corporate liability for harm caused to consumers — each accomplished without the public ever knowing who’s behind it. One Wisconsin politician describes ALEC as “a corporate dating service for lonely legislators and corporate special interests.”

“United States of ALEC” is a collaboration between Okapi Productions, LLC and the Schumann Media Center, headed by Bill Moyers, which supports independent journalism and public watchdogs including the Center for Media and Democracy, whose investigators are featured in the report.

Also re-airing is Bill’s conversation with Philip Appleman, whose creativity spans a long life filled with poetry, fiction, philosophy, and religion. A scholar of Charles Darwin, Appleman edited the critical anthology Darwin, and wrote the poetry books Darwin’s Ark and Darwin’s Bestiary. Appleman’s latest poetry collection is Perfidious Proverbs.

Short: What it's like to go to war – A veteran’s story. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: America has been at war for over a decade, with millions of soldiers having seen death and dying up close in Afghanistan and Iraq. But most Americans -- watching comfortably on their TVs and computers, witness to statistics, speeches, and “expert” rhetoric -- don’t get what’s really going on there. In an encore edition of Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill talks to Karl Marlantes – a highly-decorated Vietnam veteran, Rhodes Scholar, author, and PTSD survivor – about what we on the insulated outside need to understand about the minds and hearts of our modern warriors. Marlantes shares with Bill intimate stories about how his battlefield experiences both shaped him and nearly destroyed him, even after returning to civilian life.

"’Thou shalt not kill’ is a tenet you just do not violate, and so all your young life, that's drilled into your head,” Marlantes tells Bill. “And then suddenly, you're 18 or 19 and they're saying, ‘Go get 'em and kill for your country.’ And then you come back and it's like, ‘Well, thou shalt not kill’ again. Believe me, that’s a difficult thing to deal with.”

“You take a young man and put him in the role of God, where he is asked to take a life -- that's something no 19-year-old is able to handle.”

Short: Naomi Klein explains how Hurricane Sandy can spur economic and political transformation in America. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on the East Coast, but Naomi Klein says that the tragic destruction can also be the catalyst for the transformation of politics and our economy. On the next Moyers & Company (check local listings) the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine joins Bill to discuss hurricanes, climate change, and democracy. Klein has been in New York visiting the devastated areas -- including those where “Occupy Sandy” volunteers are unfolding new models of relief -- as part of her reporting for a new book and film on climate change and the future.

“Let’s rebuild by actually getting at the root causes. Let’s respond by aiming for an economy that responds to the crisis both [through] inequality and climate change,” Klein tells Bill. “You know, dream big.”

In the same broadcast, former Federal Election Commission Chairman Trevor Potter -- the lawyer who advised Stephen Colbert on setting up a super PAC -- dissects the spending on the most expensive election in American history. Many voices are claiming “money didn’t matter, Citizens United wasn’t a factor,” but Potter disagrees.

“Super PACs just upped the ante,” he tells Bill. “If you're a senator and you have just been elected, or heaven forbid you're up in two years, you're thinking I don't have time to worry about deficit reduction and the fiscal cliff. I have to raise tens of thousands of dollars every day to have enough money to compete with these new super PACs… And that means I need to be nice to a lot of billionaires who often want something from me in order to find the funding for my campaign.”

Moyers & Company #144 "The Election is Over -- Now What?"RELEASE DATE: November 9, 2012

Short: The election is over. What’s next for America? Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: The election is finally over. So what happens next? Moyers & Company tackles that question this weekend (check local listings) with veteran journalist James Fallows. Fallows has been writing on economic, foreign, and political affairs for The Atlantic since the l970s. He is now the magazine’s national correspondent and the author of such acclaimed books as Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economics and Political System; National Defense, winner of the National Book Award; and most recently, China Airborne.

Later on the show, Bill gets more insight with long-time New York Times columnist Bob Herbert and Reihan Salam, blogger at National Review Online’s “The Agenda,” a daily blog focused on domestic policy. Herbert has been traveling the country for the past two years reporting for his forthcoming book The Wounded Colossus, and is now Distinguished Fellow at the think tank DEMOS. Salam is the co-author, with Ross Douthat, of Grand New Party: How Conservatives Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream

Note: As a result of Hurricane Sandy's devastating effects, we are rebroadcasting the premiere of Moyers & Company, exploring politically engineered inequality -- an issue certainly as relevant at the end of 2012 as it was at the start.

Short: In an encore broadcast, Bill Moyers takes a look at how inequality has been politically engineered for the one percent.

How, in a nation as wealthy as America, can the economy simply stop working for people at large, while super-serving those at the very top? This weekend, in an encore broadcast of the premiere episode of Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill Moyers looks deeper at America’s economic disparity to investigate how it happened and who’s to blame. His detectives: political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Through exhaustive research and analysis, Hacker and Pierson — whom Moyers regards as the “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson” of economics — detail important truths behind a 30-year economic assault against the middle class.

Moyers calls the book “the best account I've seen of how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1% over everyone else, putting our once and future middle class in peril.”

“I think a lot of people know that inequality has grown in the United States. But saying that inequality has grown doesn't begin to describe what's happened,” Pierson tells Moyers. Hacker says, “It's not the haves versus the have-nots. It's the have-it-alls versus the rest of Americans.”

The show includes testimony of middle class Americans at a Senate hearing about the impact of hard times on families, as well as an essay on how Occupy Wall Street reflected a widespread belief that politics no longer works for ordinary people.

Uncovering the ways Washington helps the rich get richer. Next on Moyers & Company.

Short: Reality-checking the debates and banking reform. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: Four debates have come and gone, and in the aftermath of the pomp, points, and politics, what have we learned? And how has democracy been served? On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), two of the country’s most astute political media observers -- Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Marty Kaplan -- join Bill to weigh in on the rhetoric and realities of two campaigns now in the home stretch, looking to make their cases by any means affordable.

Jamieson is director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the driving force behind the acclaimed online watchdog FactCheck.org. Marty Kaplan is the founding director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Bill is later joined by Neil Barofsky, who held the thankless job of special inspector general in charge of policing TARP, the bailout’s Troubled Asset and Relief Plan. Between President Obama’s ineffectual proposals and Mitt Romney’s loving embrace, bankers have little to fear from either administration, and that leaves the rest of America on perilously thin economic ice. Barofsky discusses the critical yet unmet need to tackle banking reform and avoid another financial meltdown. Currently a senior fellow and adjunct professor at the New York University School of Law, Barofsky is the author of Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.

Reality-checking the debates and banking reform. Next on Moyers & Company.

Short: How far America’s mega-wealthy will go to keep the One Percent in charge. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: The One Percent is not only increasing their share of wealth – they’re using it to spread millions among political candidates who serve their interests. Example: Goldman Sachs, which gave more money than any other major American corporation to Barack Obama in 2008, is switching alliances this year; their employees have given $900,000 both to Mitt Romney’s campaign and to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future. Why? Because, says the Wall Street Journal, the Goldman Sachs gang felt betrayed by President Obama’s modest attempts at financial reform.

But even more audacious than opening your wallet to trade cash for influence is strong-arming your employees to vote as you say. Such intimidation is out in the open, from the Murray Energy CEO who reportedly made his workers spend unpaid time at a pro-Romney rally; to David and Charles Koch, who sent anti-Obama and pro-Romney materials to the 45,000 employees of their subsidiary Georgia Pacific; to ASG Solutions boss Arthur Allen, who sent an intimidating email to his employees.

On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill is joined by two veteran journalists to discuss how the super-rich have willfully confused their self-interest with America's interest. Guests are Chrystia Freeland, author of the new book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else; and Rolling Stone magazine’s Matt Taibbi, who regularly shines his spotlight on scandals involving big business and government.

Long: On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), James Balog, one of the world's premier cinemaphotographers, explains how "the earth is having a fever." At tremendous risk to his own safety, Balog has been documenting the erosion of glaciers in Switzerland, Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska. He joins Bill to share his photos and discoveries, describing his process and transformation from climate change skeptic to true believer. Balog’s soon-to-be-released film, Chasing Ice, is a breathtaking account of climate change in action.

Afterward, Bill explores a judicial system under partisan attack. Thirty-eight states now elect their high court judges. Over the last decade, $200 million -- much of it secret and tied to partisan agendas -- has been pouring into these judicial campaigns. In Florida, Pennsylvania, and Iowa, for example, justices are being targeted by radical groups that abhor judicial independence and want the courts to reflect their own political biases.

In Iowa, a state whose judicial system has been praised for its fairness and impartiality, the political and religious Right ousted three justices in 2010 over marriage equality, and is now trying to take down a fourth over the same issue. But this time a bipartisan coalition called Justice Not Politics is fighting back. Its co-founders -- Democrat Sally Pederson and Republican Joy Corning, each of whom served Iowa for eight years as lieutenant governor -- talk with Bill about what's at stake when justices are at the mercy of partisan passions and money in politics.

#139 "Hispanic America’s Turn"RELEASE DATE: October 5, 2012

Short: Univision’s Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas on Hispanic influence and power in America. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: According to the 2010 census, the number of American Hispanics grew 43% in the last decade to over 50 million. By 2050, Hispanics are projected to number 132 million and represent 30% of the population. As that population evolves, so does their political power. A new report by the Pew Hispanic Center shows that since 2008, America’s Latino voting population has grown 22% since 2008. But what are the cultural and political implications of these now well-understood statistics?

On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill goes beyond the numbers with two of our nation’s most popular and influential journalists: Univision’s Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas. Univision, a Spanish-language U.S. television network, has the largest audience of Spanish-language television viewers, according to Nielsen ratings.

Ramos, says The Washington Monthly, is "the broadcaster who will most determine the 2012 elections," while The New York Times calls Salinas "the voice of Hispanic America." In a candid and comprehensive discussion, Ramos and Salinas discuss their responsibilities both as reporters and representatives of their culture, their aggressive journalistic approaches to both President Obama and Governor Romney, and their strong takes on immigration issues that mean so much to a potentially-decisive voting bloc in 2012.

“We are changing the face of America. It's not black and white anymore. We're changing the way we eat. We're changing the way people dance, the way people speak. And we're changing the way people vote.” Ramos tells Bill. “No one can make it the White House now without the Hispanic vote -- that's completely new.”

This year, Ramos and Salinas received the Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award – the first Hispanics ever to earn the honor.

Moyers & Company #138 "United States of ALEC"RELEASE DATE: September 28, 2012

Short: Revealing the hidden world of ALEC -- the scheme to remake America, one state house at a time. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: This week on Moyers & Company (check local listings), “United States of ALEC”, an unprecedented in-depth television report on the most influential corporate-funded political force most of us have never heard of – ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. A national consortium of state politicians and powerful corporations, ALEC presents itself as a “nonpartisan public-private partnership”. But behind that mantra lies a vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to increase corporate profits at public expense.

Using interviews, documents, and personal accounts, the episode explores ALEC’s self-serving machine at work, acting in a way one Wisconsin politician describes as “a corporate dating service for lonely legislators and corporate special interests.”

In state houses around the country, hundreds of pieces of boilerplate ALEC legislation are proposed or enacted that would, among other things, dilute collective bargaining rights, make it harder for some Americans to vote, and limit corporate liability for harm caused to consumers -- each accomplished without the public ever knowing who's behind it.

“All of us here are very familiar with ALEC and the influence that ALEC has with many of the [legislative] members,” said Arizona State Senator Steve Farley. “Corporations have the right to present their arguments, but they don’t have the right to do it secretly.”

"United States of ALEC" is a collaboration between Okapi Productions (the filmmakers Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes) and the Schumann Media Center, headed by Bill Moyers, which supports independent journalism and public watchdogs such as the Center for Media and Democracy, whose investigators are featured in the report.

Also appearing on the Moyers & Company broadcast is Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center and founder of FactCheck.org, who talks about deception and truth in the 2012 campaign.

Short: Trevor Potter on fighting back against Big Money. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: One of the reasons Moyers & Company frequently returns to the theme of money and politics is because it’s absolutely necessary to do so. Nothing corrupts our political system more than the ability of the rich and influential to spend limitless amounts of money -- often in secret -- with the intention of creating preferred political outcomes. And far from being a regulator of campaign finances, our political funding laws -- aided by a corporate-friendly Supreme Court and self-interested politicians -- only facilitate the process of empowering the few while subjugating the many.

Few understand the ways money moves in and out of our political system than campaign finance reform advocate Trevor Potter. A former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and founding president of the Campaign Legal Center, Potter was Stephen Colbert’s chief advisor when Colbert formed his own super PAC and 501 (c)(4) in a clever effort to expose the potential for chicanery behind each.

On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill and Potter discuss how American elections are bought and sold, who covers the cost, and how the rest of us pay the price.

“I can assure you that if someone is spending millions of dollars to elect the candidate, the candidate knows where that money is coming from. There's nothing illegal about telling them, but the voters aren't going to know that,” Potter tells Bill. “We’re creating opportunities for corruption and candidates being beholden to specific private interests because of funding, yet there's no disclosure to the rest of us.”

Also on the show, a Bill Moyers Essay on the bags of money that campaigns drop on consultants and TV ads to affect and distort your point of view.

Short: The Unchecked Power of the One-Percent Court. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: Because of partisan gridlock in Washington, the Supreme Court has become the most powerful and outspoken branch of government – decisions they make shape our democracy’s fate for generations to come. Now, one has only to look at Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, and the Affordable Care Act rulings to understand why some call it a “one-percent Court” -- dedicated by majority rule to preserving the power and influence of a minority of wealthy special interests.

This week on Moyers & Company (check local listings), The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and Jamie Raskin, constitutional law professor and Maryland state senator, join Bill to discuss how the uncontested power of the Supreme Court is changing our elections, our country, and our lives. The two joined forces for a special issue of The Nation entitled “The One Percent Court.”

“We wanted to bring attention to how this court has empowered the 1% at the expense of the 99%,” says vanden Heuvel. “How it is now working for big business, for corporate power against the interests of ordinary citizens in this country.”

Also on the program, Bill talks with Craig Unger, author of Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power, about Rove’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering and collaborations to once again affect the outcome of a presidential election.

“Most people thought he was a creature of the Bush family,” Unger tells Bill. “I think he’s a force more powerful than that.”

Short: Bernie Sanders on the Independent in Politics. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: The conventions are over -- now it’s time for some thinking outside the box. This week on Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill talks with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who’s been an independent in Congress for 21 years -- longer than anyone in American history. In 2010, Sanders made national news when he delivered an eight-and-a-half-hour speech attacking the agreement President Obama and the Republicans had made to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

Bill also talks to Green Party candidates Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala about what they’ve learned about American politics. Stein graduated from Harvard Medical School to become an internist specializing in environmental health. She was a Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate in 2002, co-founded the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities in 2003, and represented the Green-Rainbow Party in state races in 2004 and 2006. Honkala is an anti-poverty activist and community organizer who co-founded the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. A formerly homeless single mother, Honkala became the first woman ever to run for Sheriff of Philadelphia in 2011.

Challenging power and changing politics. Next on Moyers & Company.

Moyers & Company #134 "The Resurrection of Ralph Reed"RELEASE DATE: August 30, 2012

Short: The Resurrection of Ralph Reed. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: While Romney, Ryan, Christie, and Rubio get the lion’s share of attention during the Republican Convention this week, three one-time college Republicans who are now the party’s real power-brokers -- Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist -- are busy doing what they do best: leveraging their political, religious, and financial resources to back pro-corporate, anti-government objectives at the core of the conservative agenda.

The true surprise at the Tampa convention is Ralph Reed’s resurrection. When the former head of the Christian Coalition was discovered to have raked in millions of dollars from the super lobbyist -- and eventually convicted felon -- Jack Abramoff, Reed wound up in political purgatory. But outraged by the election of Barack Obama, and responding to what he describes as God’s call (via Sean Hannity), Reed returned to start the Faith and Freedom Coalition with the aim of toppling Barack Obama from the White House. To succeed, Reed needs to win the allegiance of many of the trusting Christian followers he had duped and double-crossed while working with Abramoff. Can he pull it off? That’s the story this week on Moyers & Company (check local listings).

Later on the show, Bill also talks with Mike Lofgren, a long-time Republican who says the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism transformed his party and created a de facto religious test for the presidency. Lofgren tells the story in his book The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.

The resurrection of Ralph Reed: revolution or racket? Next on Moyers & Company.

Short: Nuns hit the highway on a controversial road trip of faith and politics. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long:Weeks before Republican Paul Ryan was selected to run for vice president, Sister Simone Campbell -- who heads NETWORK, a Catholic policy and lobbying group -- hit the road to protest the so-called “Ryan budget” recently passed by the House of Representatives. She and some of her sister nuns rolled across the heartland on a bus trip designed to arouse public concern over what the Ryan plan would mean for social services in America, especially its slashing of programs for the poor. Sister Simone says his budget is inconsistent with Catholic social teaching. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops agrees.

But other Catholics say Sister Simone and the nuns have crossed the line, becoming too outspoken and political. Robert Royal, editor in chief of The Catholic Thing and founder of the Faith & Reason Institute, believes that issues of economic inequality are being oversimplified. Royal says the focus should be on creating a more dynamic economy for all.

It's one of the hottest issues of this overheated summer and it's on Moyers & Company this week (check local listings http://billmoyers.com/schedule/). Watch our field report from producers who rode along on the “Nuns on the Bus” tour, then join a passionate, candid discussion with Sister Simone and Royal.

Short: Confronting the Contradictions of America’s Past. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: Learning from our racial past is crucial to addressing America’s current ethnic tensions, but only if we confront key historical contradictions. In an encore broadcast of Moyers & Company (check local listings), Khalil Muhammad helps bring these issues to light. Muhammad heads the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness, which connects American histories of race, crime and the making of urban America to modern headlines.

Moyers & Company #131Between Two Worlds: Life on the Border (Rebroadcast)RELEASE DATE: August 10, 2012

Long: No writer understands the border culture between Mexico and the United States more intimately than Luis Alberto Urrea, this week’s guest on an encore broadcast of Moyers & Company (Check local listings). His own life is the stuff of great novels. Son of a Mexican father and Anglo mother, Urrea grew up first in Tijuana and then just across the border in San Diego. Over the years he has produced a series of acclaimed novels, including The Hummingbird’s Daughter, The Devil’s Highway, and his latest, Queen of America – each a rich and revealing account of the people of the borderlands that join and separate our two nations.

Earlier this year, a number of books were removed from Tucson, Arizona classrooms when the Tucson school district eliminated a Mexican-American studies program on the accusation it was “divisive.” The program included references to Urrea’s work. Urrea talks with Bill Moyers about that episode as he unfolds the modern reality of life on the border.

Short: How Voter ID Laws Are Suppressing the Vote. Next on Moyers & Company

Long: The fight against voter fraud is a solution in search of a problem -- documented instances of voter fraud these days are surprisingly few. Nevertheless, since the 2010 midterm elections, new election laws passed by Republican-dominated legislatures in 14 states have sought to limit voter registration or require photo IDs in order to vote -- identification that for many is too expensive or otherwise difficult to obtain.

Such laws, according to a recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice “will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of poor Americans to vote." That’s why some say the real goal isn’t about fighting voter fraud; it’s about enabling voter suppression.

This week on Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill talks to Keesha Gaskins, an attorney and co-author of that report, and Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, about modern efforts to keep minorities and the poor in particular from exercising one of the most fundamental American rights.

“When these votes come under attack by this level of partisan gamesmanship, it's completely inappropriate and antithetical to our history,” Gaskins tells Bill. “This is a very real political issue, but beyond that, this is a real issue of real Americans being able to access and be self-determinative in how we're governed.”

Also on the program, Bill talks with Anthony Baxter, director of You’ve Been Trumped! an upcoming documentary about Donald Trump’s aggressive efforts to build “the greatest golf course in the world” along ancient sand dunes on the coast of Scotland. A veteran journalist, Baxter says what Trump and even local media are hailing an economic boon is actually a disaster threatening the environment and callously disrupting peoples’ lives – a perfect example of capitalism run amok, and how the rest of us pay the price.

“It seems to me there's one rule for the super-rich and one rule for everybody else,” Baxter says. “And the 99 percent of people in the world are tired and fed up of having money and power riding roughshod over their lives and our planet… Our planet, I don't think, can afford these kinds of decisions.”

Moyers & Company #129 "What It's Like to Go to War"RELEASE DATE: July 27, 2012

Short: What it's like to go to war – a veteran’s story. Next on Moyers & Company

Long: America has been at war for over a decade now, with millions of soldiers having seen death and dying up close in Afghanistan and Iraq. But most Americans, watching comfortably on their TVs and computers, witness mostly to statistics, stump speeches, and “expert” rhetoric, don’t get what’s really going on there. This week on Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill talks to Karl Marlantes – a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, Rhodes Scholar, author, and PTSD survivor – about what we on the insulated outside need to understand about the minds and hearts of our modern warriors. Marlantes shares with Bill intimate stories about how his battlefield experiences both shaped him and nearly destroyed him, even after returning to civilian life.

"’Thou shalt not kill’ is a tenet you just do not violate, and so all your young life, that's drilled into your head,” Marlantes tells Bill. “And then suddenly, you're 18 or 19 and they're saying, ‘Go get 'em and kill for your country.’ And then you come back and it's like, ‘Well, thou shalt not kill’ again. Believe me, that’s a difficult thing to deal with.”

“You take a young man and put him in the role of God, where he is asked to take a life -- that's something no 19-year-old is able to handle.”

Short: Calling attention to America’s ‘sacrifice zones.’ Next on Moyers & Company

Long: There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed. Journalist Chris Hedges calls these places “sacrifice zones,” and joins Bill this week on Moyers & Company (check local listings) to explore how areas like Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, Florida; and parts of West Virginia suffer while the corporations that plundered them thrive.

“It's the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings… And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state.”

Hedges also makes the case that journalists “take sides,” describing the difference between truth and news. “The really great reporters -- and I've seen them in all sorts of news organizations -- are management headaches because they care about truth at the expense of their own career,” Hedges says.

Moyers & Company #127 “Banking on Greed”RELEASE DATE: July 13, 2012

Short: The uphill fight to make banks honest and accountable. Next on Moyers & Company

Long: Just when you think the reputation of banks couldn’t get any worse, comes word that we’ve seen nothing yet. As many as 20 banking institutions, including Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, UBS and HSBC, are reportedly under investigation for illegal and unethical practices toward protecting their profits at all costs and letting others pay for their mistakes. An MIT professor of finance told CNN, “This dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scams in the history of markets.”

On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), financial expert Sheila Bair talks with Bill about the lawlessness of our banking system and the prognosis for meaningful reform. Bair was appointed in 2006 by President George W. Bush to chair the FDIC. During the 2008 meltdown, she argued that in some cases banks were NOT too big to fail – that instead of bailouts, they should be sold off to healthier competitors. Now a senior adviser to the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bair has organized a private group of financial experts including former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, former Senators Bill Bradley and Alan Simpson, and John Reed, once the chairman of Citicorp, to explore ways to prevent the banking industry from scuttling reforms created by the Dodd-Frank Act.

Also on the show, Bill talks to scientist and philosopher Vandana Shiva, who’s become a rock star in the global battle over genetically modified seeds. These seeds -- considered “intellectual property” by the big companies who own the patents -- are globally marketed to monopolize food production and profits. Opponents challenge the safety of genetically modified seeds, claiming they also harm the environment, are more costly, and leave local farmers deep in debt as well as dependent on suppliers. Shiva, who founded a movement in India to promote native seeds, sees this as the latest battleground in the war on Planet Earth.

“When seed is in the hands of five companies -- 75% of the commercial seed is already in their hands. Ninety percent of the corn. Ninety percent of the soy. Ninety-five percent of the cotton -- this is an emergency. It is a seed dictatorship.” Shiva tells Bill. “And when you control seed, you control food.”

Moyers & Company #126 "Is Labor A Lost Cause?"RELEASE DATE: June 29, 2012

Short: Is Labor A Lost Cause? Next on Moyers & Company

Long: Bill opens this week’s show by explaining how last week’s Supreme Court decision not to reconsider Citizens United exposes the hoax that Citizens United was ever about “free” speech. In reality, Bill says, it’s about carpet bombing elections “with all the tonnage your rich paymasters want to buy.”

Also lost in the Supreme media chatter last week: a disturbing ruling that restricts labor unions from directing collected dues toward political causes. There’s no such limit on corporations, naturally – yet another indication that the power and status of modern unions is waning, especially when compared to the unbridled influence of Corporate America. With a sharp decline in union membership, a legion of new enemies, and a series of legal and legislative setbacks, can unions rebound and once again act strongly in the interest of ordinary workers?

On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill talks to two people who can best answer the question: Stephen Lerner and Bill Fletcher, Jr. The architect of the SEIU’s Justice for Janitors movement, Lerner directed SEIU’s private equity project, which worked to expose a Wall Street feeding frenzy that left the working class in a state of catastrophe. Fletcher took his Harvard degree to the Massachusetts shipyards, and worked as a welder before becoming a labor activist. He served as assistant to the president of the AFL-CIO, and is author of the upcoming book They’re Bankrupting Us – And 20 Other Myths About Unions.

Later in the show, Bill talks with and invites readings by poet Philip Appleman, whose creativity spans a long life filled with verse, fiction, philosophy, religion… and Darwinism. Appleman’s latest collection is Perfidious Proverbs.

Short: Confronting the Contradictions of America’s Past. Next on Moyers & Company

Long: Bill opens this weekend’s Moyers & Company (check local listings) with thoughts about the origins and lessons of Independence Day. We should remember, he says, that behind this Fourth of July holiday are human beings, like Thomas Jefferson, who were as flawed and conflicted as they were inspired, who espoused great humanistic ideals while behaving with reprehensible racial discrimination. That conflict -- between what we know and how we live -- is still a struggle in contemporary politics and society.

No stranger to the contradictions of history and their racial touchpoints is Bill’s studio guest Khalil Muhammad. Head of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Muhammad is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness, which connects American histories of race, crime and the making of urban America to modern headlines. Muhammad and Moyers discuss the importance of confronting the contradictions of America’s past.

Short: How Big Banks Victimize Our Democracy – with Government’s Help. Next on Moyers & Company

Long: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s appearances in the last two weeks before Congressional committees -- many members of which received campaign contributions from the megabank -- beg the question: For how long and in how many ways are average Americans going to pay the price for big bank hubris, with our own government acting as accomplice? On this week’s Moyers & Company, Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith, creator of the finance and economics blog Naked Capitalism, discuss the folly and corruption of both banks and government, and how that tag-team leaves deep wounds in our democracy. Taibbi’s latest piece is “The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia.” Smith is the author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.

Meanwhile, for anyone who wants to understand why, in one of the richest nations in the world, so many poor people are teetering on the edge, author and advocate Peter Edelman joins Bill to talk about continuing efforts to fight poverty, and what it will take to keep the needs of poor people on the American political agenda. A former aide to Robert Kennedy and faculty director of Georgetown University's Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy, Edelman’s new book is So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America.

Short: Shining light on the dark money corrupting elections and democracy. Next on Moyers & Company

Long: "Let’s face it,” the founder of a super PAC recently told Mother Jones magazine. “Politics in this country is coin-operated." True enough, as evidenced by the billions projected to be spent in this year’s elections -- untold amounts of it unleashed by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. Even with all that money being cashed in, the busy check-writers and the influence they purchase remain largely hidden, including those who helped Republican Governor Scott Walker dramatically out-fundraise his Democratic challenger to win last week’s recall election.

While much of the mainstream media looks the other way some journalists are working hard to identify the fingerprints super PACs and their benefactors leave on our victimized democracy.

On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill talks with Mother Jones editors Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein, who continue to throw light on what they call “dark money,” the conspiracy of cash that allows the rich to influence our most fundamental political freedoms. Bill also calls out some of the biggest super PAC donors, revealing how easy it is for the wealthy one percent to sway an election.

Bill also talks with historian Thomas Frank, author of the bestseller What’s the Matter with Kansas?, about the power of concentrated money to subvert democracy, and shrewdly successful moves by the rich and powerful to redirect public anger and rewrite reality. How does a society built on democratic ideals allow them to become so corrupted? Frank’s most recent book is Pity the Billionaire.

Short: How big money and big media have coupled to create a ‘Disney World’ of democracy. Next on Moyers & Company

Long: Big money and big media have coupled to create a ‘Disney World’ of democracy in which TV shows, televised debates, even news coverage is being dumbed down, just as the volume is being turned up. The result is a public certainly more entertained, but less informed and personally involved than they should be, says Marty Kaplan, director of USC’s Norman Lear Center and an entertainment industry veteran. This weekend, in an encore broadcast of on Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill Moyers talks with Kaplan about how taking news out of the journalism box and placing it in the entertainment box is hurting democracy and allowing special interest groups to manipulate the system.

“It's all about combat. If every political issue is [represented by] combat between two polarized sides, then you get great television because people are throwing food at each other,” Kaplan tells Moyers. “And you have an audience that hasn't a clue at the end of the story, which is why you'll hear, ‘Well, we'll have to leave it there.’”

“The problem is that there's not that much information out there if you're an ordinary citizen. You can ferret it out, but it ought not be like that in a democracy,” Kaplan says. “Education and journalism were supposed to, according to our founders, inform our public and make democracy work.”

Later on the show, Bill talks about Florida Rep. Allen West and shocking modern-day McCarthyism. Wasn’t this lesson already learned?

Short: How do conservatives and liberals see the world? There's more than meets the eye. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: Our country is more politically polarized than ever. Is it possible to agree to disagree and still move on to solve our massive problems? Or are the blind leading the blind -- over the cliff?

In an encore episode of Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt talk about the psychological underpinnings of our contentious culture, why we can’t trust our own opinions, and the demonizing of our adversaries.

“When it gets so that your opponents are not just people you disagree with, but… the mental state in which I am fighting for good, and you are fighting for evil, it's very difficult to compromise,” Haidt tells Moyers. “Compromise becomes a dirty word.”

Long: In somber observance of Memorial Day, we look at actions by our government that flaunt the values of honor and decency our soldiers sacrifice so much to uphold.

After 9/11, the U.S. government turned to torture -- in defiance of domestic and international laws -- to extract information about and from terrorists and others who might follow after them. Were it not for defense attorneys and the work of human rights organizations, these prisoners would be ignored. But that’s changing.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the international literary and human rights group PEN have teamed up to comb through 150,000 declassified documents -- as well as large collections of articles and transcripts -- to produce The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program, written by PEN's Larry Siems. PEN and the ACLU have also staged readings of excerpts from the documents and first-person testimony at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and Lincoln Center here in New York.

Those readings have been videotaped and are being made into a documentary by movie director Doug Liman called Reckoning with Torture. Liman is now asking people across the country to videotape their own readings of declassified memos and testimonies for the project.

On this weekend’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Siems, director of the Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center, and Liman, whose credits include The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Fair Game, join Bill Moyers to talk about what we should be learning from and doing about U.S. torture tactics.

Short: Tom Morello: A Troubadour for Justice. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: Songs of social protest -- music and the quest for justice -- have long been intertwined, and the troubadours of troubling times -- Guthrie, Seeger, Baez, Dylan, and Springsteen among them -- have become famous for their dedication to both. Now we can add a name to the ranks of those who lift their voices for social and economic justice: Tom Morello.

Morello, who will be Bill’s guest on Moyers & Company this weekend (check local listings), is the Harvard-educated (honors in political science!) guitarist who dabbled in politics, then chose rock music to make a difference. He played guitar for the popular band he co-founded -- Rage Against the Machine -- and then for Audioslave. Rolling Stone chose his album “World Wide Rebel Songs” as one of the best of 2011, and named him one of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.

As likely to be spotted at a grass-roots rally as he would at a concert hall, Morello was in Madison, Wisconsin last year, braving bitter winter weather to sing on the steps on the state capitol in support of public service workers. Morello defended their collective bargaining rights against Republican Governor Scott Walker. He was in New York City at the May Day demonstrations, an honorary commander of a battalion of musicians they called the “Occupy Guitarmy.” That same night, Harry Belafonte presented Morello with the Officers’ Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation, honoring his “advocacy for and support of working people across the world.”

This weekend, Tom Morello shares his music, his message, and mission with Bill Moyers, who’s all ears.

Moyers & Company #118 "Fighting for Fair Play on TV and Taxes"RELEASE DATE: May 11, 2012

Short: Fighting for fair play on TV and taxes. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: With the 2012 campaign season moving from primary to election mode, Bill invites back to his studio master media decoder Kathleen Hall Jamieson for a closer look at the role media misinformation will play in the Obama vs. Romney TV ad slugfest. Jamieson runs the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, including the sites FactCheck.org and FlackCheck.org. On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Jamieson discusses the sharp increase in deceptive advertising in the 2012 race, and equally alarming new obstacles to campaign ad transparency.

Later in the show, Bill talks to RoseAnn DeMoro, who heads the largest registered nurses union in the country, and will lead a Chicago march protesting economic inequality on May 18. DeMoro is championing the Robin Hood Tax, a small government levy the financial sector would pay on commercial transactions like stocks and bonds. The money generated, which some estimate to be as much as $350 billion annually, could be used for social programs and job creation – ultimately to people who, without a doubt, need it more than the banks do. Though the power and influence of Big Banking is intimidating, DeMoro and her organization have an inspiring history of defeating some of the toughest opponents in government and politics.

Fighting for fair play on TV and taxes. Next on Moyers & Company.

Moyers & Company #117 "Between Two Worlds: Life on the Border"RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2012

Long: No writer understands the border culture between Mexico and the United States more intimately than Luis Alberto Urrea, this week’s guest on Moyers & Company. His own life is the stuff of great novels. Son of a Mexican father and Anglo mother, Urrea grew up first in Tijuana and then just across the border in San Diego. Over the years he has produced a series of acclaimed novels, including The Hummingbird’s Daughter, The Devil’s Highway, and his latest, Queen of America – each a rich and revealing account of the people of the borderlands that join and separate our two nations.

Three of Urrea’s books were among scores of others removed from classrooms earlier this year when the Tucson school district eliminated Mexican-American studies on the accusation it was “divisive.” But there’s no ban on ideas in Bill’s studio, and Urrea talks with Bill Moyers about that episode as he unfolds the modern reality of life on the border. Check local listings for times and channels.

Short: How big money and big media have coupled to create a ‘Disney World’ of democracy. Next on Moyers & CompanyLong: Big money and big media have coupled to create a ‘Disney World’ of democracy in which TV shows, televised debates, even news coverage is being dumbed down, just as the volume is being turned up. The result is a public certainly more entertained, but less informed and personally involved than they should be, says Marty Kaplan, director of USC’s Norman Lear Center and an entertainment industry veteran. This weekend on Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers talks with Kaplan about how taking news out of the journalism box and placing it in the entertainment box is hurting democracy and allowing special interest groups to manipulate the system.

“It's all about combat. If every political issue is [represented by] combat between two polarized sides, then you get great television because people are throwing food at each other,” Kaplan tells Moyers. “And you have an audience that hasn't a clue at the end of the story, which is why you'll hear, ‘Well, we'll have to leave it there.’”

“The problem is that there's not that much information out there if you're an ordinary citizen. You can ferret it out, but it ought not be like that in a democracy,” Kaplan says. “Education and journalism were supposed to, according to our founders, inform our public and make democracy work.”

Later on the show, Bill talks about Florida Rep. Allen West and shocking modern-day McCarthyism. Wasn’t this lesson already learned?

Short: Two popular political writers share how American liberalism and Christianity have gone off the rails -- and the implications for American democracy.

Long: Two movements once at the vital center of our society, liberal politics and American Christianity have gone astray, says Eric Alterman (from the left) and Ross Douthat (from the right). On this weekend’s Moyers & Company (check local listings) each meets separately with Bill to discuss the implications of this wayward course on American Democracy.

First, Eric Alterman describes the grand aspirations, ambitions, and historical ironies that prompted him to write his new book The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama. He calls on liberals to regain "the fighting spirit" that characterized Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and to put it in service of new liberal policies for the 2lst century. Liberals, he tells Moyers, have overpromised and underperformed, and it's time once again to make government credible.

Ross Douthat, the conservative op-ed columnist for The New York Times and author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, is just as candid about how traditional and institutional Christianity has declined from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan force to a polarizing, heretical combatant in the culture war. He argues that a revival of true and basic Christian principles can lead to American renewal.

Also, can you imagine Super Grover followed by a super PAC ad? No? Neither can Bill Moyers. In a new essay at the top of the show, Moyers talks about the recent federal appeals court decision of to allow political and issue advertising on public TV and radio channels. "Just say no," Moyers urges station managers across the country -- but they need your help.

Short: Despair is not in her vocabulary: Angela Blackwell and fighting for the American Dream. Next on Moyers & Company

Long: Angela Blackwell has spent her adult life advocating practical ways to fulfill America’s promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all. Now, with our middle class struggling, poverty rising, and inequality growing, the founder and chief executive officer of PolicyLink, an influential research center, finds reasons for hope in the face of these hard realities.

On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill Moyers and Blackwell discuss what fuels her optimism. “I'm not discouraged, and I wouldn't even dream of giving up, because we're at a moment right now where I think we have more possibility than I've seen in my adult lifetime,” Blackwell tells Moyers. “Part of what I've been feeling is that all the issues are finally on the table… So many people who are being left behind are now in places where they have voice, and influence, and they're forcing their way into the conversation.”

“America doesn’t want to talk about race,” she states, but says the future “is a five-year-old Latina girl. It is a seven-year-old black boy. What happens to them will determine what America looks like…. and so this country, as a democracy, really cannot expect to continue to be proud on the world stage, competitive in the global economy, or having a democracy it can put forward as working in a multi-racial society if we don't invest in the people who are the future.”

Short: Paul Volcker on why banks are wrong to undermine the Volcker Rule. Next on Moyers & Company

Long: You’d think after such a calamitous economic fall, there’d be a strong consensus on reinforcing the protections that keep us out of harm’s way. But in some powerful corners, the opposite is happening. Business and political forces, including hordes of mercenary lobbyists, are working hard to diminish or destroy these protections. One of the biggest bull’s-eyes is on the Volcker Rule, a section of the Dodd-Frank Law that aims to keep the banks in which you deposit your money from gambling it on their own -- sometimes risky -- investments.

On this week’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill talks with the namesake of the Volcker Rule -- Paul Volcker, who served two terms as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1979-1987 and currently heads President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Volcker contends the rule aims to end conflicts of interest between bankers and their customers. He suggests that former investment companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which sought banking licenses during the economic crisis in order to access federal protection against failing, should now turn in in those licenses if they want to do speculative trading.

“You shouldn’t run a financial system on the expectation of government support. We’re supposed to be a free enterprise system,” Volcker tells Moyers. “The problem of course is once they get rescued, does that lead to the conclusion they’ll get rescued in the future?”

If all that disillusions you about government, know you aren’t entirely powerless to create change. So says Bill’s second guest, Carne Ross. Once the rising star of British diplomacy and now a global activist, Ross’ book The Leaderless Revolution outlines ways to create alternative systems of governance and commerce.

“We have to accept that government is no longer fixing things for us. Whoever’s in charge, whichever bunch of politicians has taken over government, they will not provide the answer,” Ross tells Moyers. “We have to instead take on the burden ourselves. That is a fundamental cultural change, and I think it requires a real examination of our role in political circumstances.”

Ross, who resigned his British diplomatic role in objection to his government’s positions during the Iraq War, shares nine crucial principles for effective citizen action. He also describes his work with the Occupy movement to devise an alternative banking system – an “Occupy Bank” – more aligned with the public interest.

Moyers concludes the broadcast with an essay on what several American cities are doing to restructure Wall Street from the bottom up.

Short: Social Activism 2.0 – How citizens are standing up for democracy

Long: American history is rich with stories of social change inspired by the actions of motivated individuals and organized groups. Today’s activists are no different -- facing long odds against powerful and systemic special interests.

On this weekend’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill Moyers talks with young but very experienced organizers George Goehl, Ai-Jen Poo, and Sarita Gupta – all involved with a nationwide citizens’ initiative called the 99% Spring, which takes place the week of April 9th. Organizers aim to train 100,000 Americans to teach about income inequality in homes, places of worship, campuses and the streets.

A 99% Spring co-organizer, George Goehl is executive director of National People’s Action, a network of grassroots organizations using direct action to battle economic and racial injustice.

Ai-Jen Poo, director and co-founder of the 10,000-member National Domestic Workers Alliance, led the fight for passage of The Domestic Worker’s Bill of Rights in New York State, the first of its kind in America. Sarita Gupta is executive director of Jobs with Justice, a labor organization in 46 cities and 26 states working to create a broad, global movement for economic and social justice. Poo and Gupta are also participating in an economic campaign for domestic and homecare workers of all ages called Caring Across Generations.

Moyers concludes the broadcast with an essay on what citizens can do to find out who's paying for all those political ads running on their local television stations.

Long: Nine years after Baghdad erupted in “shock and awe,” we’re once again hearing in America the drumbeat for war in the Middle East. Now, the bull’s-eye is on Iran. But what we need more than a simple change of target is a complete change in perspective, says Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran-turned-scholar who’s become one of the most perceptive observers of America’s changing role in the world.

This week, on an all-new Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill Moyers and Bacevich explore the futility of “endless” wars and provide a reality check on the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. “Are we so unimaginative, so wedded to the reliance on military means that we cannot conceive of any way to reconcile our differences with groups and nations in the Islamic world, and therefore bring this conflict to an end?” Bacevich tells Moyers. Bacevich also answers the question of whether Iran is a direct threat to America with a definitive no.

"Whatever threat Iran poses is very, very limited," he tells Moyers, "and certainly does not constitute any kind of justification for yet another experiment with preventive war."

Short: How power and influence helped big banks rewrite the rules of our economy. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: Big banks are rewriting the rules of our economy to the exclusive benefit of their own bottom line. But how did our political and financial class shift the benefits of the economy to the very top, while saddling us with greater debt and tearing new holes in the safety net? This weekend on an encore episode of Moyers & Company (check your local listings), Bill Moyers talks with former Citigroup Chairman John Reed and former Senator Byron Dorgan to explore a momentous instance: how the mid-90’s merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group – and a friendly Presidential pen -- brought down the Glass-Steagall Act, a crucial firewall between banks and investment firms which had protected consumers from financial calamity since the aftermath of the Great Depression. In effect, says Moyers, they put the watchdog to sleep.

There’s no clearer example of the collusion between government and corporate finance than the Citicorp-Travelers merger, which -- thanks to the removal of Glass-Steagall -- enabled the formation of the financial behemoth known as Citigroup. But even behemoths are vulnerable; when the meltdown hit, the bank cut more than 50,000 jobs, and the taxpayers shelled out more than $45 billion to save it.

Senator Dorgan tells Moyers, “If you were to rank big mistakes in the history of this country, that was one of the bigger ones because it has set back this country in a very significant way.”

Now, John Reed regrets his role in the affair, and says lifting the Glass Steagall protections was a mistake. Given the 2008 meltdown, he’s surprised Wall Street still has so much power over Washington lawmakers.

“I'm quite surprised the political establishment would listen to groups that have been so discredited,” Reed tells Moyers. “It wasn't that there was one or two or institutions that, you know, got carried away and did stupid things. It was, we all did… And then the whole system came down.”

How Wall Street and Washington got together and stacked the deck against the rest of us. Next on Moyers & Company.

Short: David Stockman, the former Washington powerhouse – and Ronald Reagan’s budget director – tells Bill Moyers how the cozy relationship between Washington and Wall Street has perverted capitalism and subverted democracy. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: For years, high-ranking administration officials have spun through the revolving door between the White House and American big business. But how have they influenced the regulation and reform of industries from which they came, and American democracy as a result? This weekend, in an encore broadcast, Moyers & Company explores the tight connection between Wall Street and the White House with David Stockman, former budget director for President Reagan. (Check your local listings)

Now a businessman who says he was “taken to the woodshed” for telling the truth about the administration’s tax policies, Stockman speaks candidly with Bill Moyers about how money dominates politics, distorting free markets and endangering democracy. “As a result,” Stockman says, “we have neither capitalism nor democracy. We have crony capitalism.”

“We now have an entitled class of Wall Street financiers and of corporate CEOs who believe the government is there to do… whatever it takes in order to keep the game going and their stock price moving upward,” Stockman tells Moyers.

Also on the show, Moyers talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and columnist Gretchen Morgenson on how money and political clout enable industries to escape regulation and enrich executives at the top.

Short: Bill Moyers takes a second look at how inequality today has been politically engineered for the one percent. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: How, in a nation as wealthy as America, can the economy simply stop working for people at large, while super-serving those at the very top? This weekend, in an encore broadcast of the premiere episode of Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill Moyers looks deeper at America’s economic disparity to investigate how it happened and who’s to blame. His detectives: political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Through exhaustive research and analysis, Hacker and Pierson — whom Moyers regards as the “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson” of economics — detail important truths behind a 30-year economic assault against the middle class.

Moyers calls the book “the best account I've seen of how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1% over everyone else, putting our once and future middle class in peril.”

Pierson tells Moyers, “I think a lot of people know that inequality has grown in the United States. But saying that inequality has grown doesn't begin to describe what's happened.” Says Hacker: “It's not the haves versus the have-nots. It's the have-it-alls versus the rest of Americans.”

The show includes testimony of middle class Americans at a Senate hearing about the impact of hard times on families, as well as an essay on how Occupy Wall Street reflects a widespread belief that politics no longer works for ordinary people, including footage we took at the OWS rally from October-December 2011.

Uncovering the ways Washington helps the rich get richer. Next on Moyers & Company.

Moyers & Company #107 "Where Do Movies End and Politics Begin?"Release Date: February 24, 2012

Short: Where do movies end and politics begin -- does it matter? Next on Moyers & Company.Long: How does pop culture not only reflect, but influence political culture? On this weekend’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), historian and culture critic Neal Gabler joins Bill to discuss how representations of heroism in movies shape our expectations of a U.S. President, and how our real-world candidates are packaged into superficial, two-dimensional personas designed to appeal to both the electorate and the media.

Also on the show, Bill talks with acclaimed poet and Poetry Magazine editor Chris Wiman about how finding true love and being diagnosed with a rare and incurable blood cancer reignited his religious passion as well as his creative expression.

Finally, is it fair for parents to opt out of vaccinations for their children on the basis of religion or philosophy -- and how many pay the price for that decision? In a new broadcast essay, Bill Moyers weighs the value of personal liberty versus the greater public health.

Long: We are saturated with deceptive political advertising, aided and abetted now with spending by citizens, corporations, and Super PACs that seem to know no bounds. Add to that the relatively cheap "buys" on media landscape including television, the web, print media, and social networks, and there’s no place for the electorate to escape.

But help is on the way. This weekend on Moyers & Company, Bill asks political communication expert and “master media decoder” Kathleen Hall Jamieson to separate fact from fiction in the national campaigns thus far. Jamieson runs the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, including the sites FactCheck.org and FlackCheck.org.

The show then moves from politics to poetry as Bill welcomes former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, who this very week received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama. Dove served two terms as Poet Laureate, the youngest and the first African American to be named to that prestigious position. Through an intimate conversation and select readings, Moyers and Dove explore American history, language, culture, and ideas. They also talk about the responsibility – and controversy – that comes with editing a prestigious anthology, as Dove was recently tasked for The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry.

Short: Decoding the languages of politics and poetry. Next on Moyers & Company.

Moyers & Company #105 "Economic Malpractice and the Millennials"Release Date: February 10, 2012

Short: How economic inequality destroys opportunity for the millennial generation. Next on Moyers & Company.

Long: There are 80-plus million Americans today who were born roughly between l978 and 2000, and they’re getting hit hard by economic circumstances created over the past 30 years by The One Percent. The Millennials are the first generation of Americans who cannot count on doing better than their parents. Many Millennials are working longer hours, and have seen their earnings decrease. Meanwhile, their personal debt has increased over the last four years to the point where they face unrelenting payments on interest for money they borrowed for college or just to stay above water.

How have these realities affected their outlook? And how does that impact Barack Obama's future? Millennials turned out for him by huge margins in 2008, but their enthusiasm has waned. On this week’s Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers talks with a millennial who has dedicated herself to tackling these issues. At 3l, Heather McGhee directs the Washington office of the research and advocacy group Demos and is fighting for financial reforms and consumer protection.

“Our generation is the most diverse generation in American history. But we are also the generation that is experiencing record inequality -- inequality in our economy and inequality in our democracy,” McGhee tells Moyers. “We need to become a very politically engaged generation."

In the same broadcast, Moyers talks with conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, who wrote "the bible" for the Reagan Revolution, worked on domestic policy for the Reagan White House, and served as a top treasury official under the first President Bush. Now he's a heretic in the conservative circles where he once was a star.

Bartlett argues that right-wing tax policies -- pushed by the ideologue Grover Norquist, Tea Party activists, and the One Percent's rented politicians -- are destroying the country's economic foundation. When he called George W. Bush out as “a pretend conservative” in his book Impostor: Why George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, Bartlett was fired from his position as a senior fellow at a conservative think tank. He is now an apostate in his own party because he refuses to allow ideology to overwhelm facts. His new book is The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform -- Why We Need It and What It Will Take.

Moyers & Company #104 "How Do Conservatives and Liberals See the World?"Release Date: February 3, 2012

Short: How do conservatives and liberals see the world? There's more than meets the eye.Long:Our country is more politically polarized than ever. Is it possible to agree to disagree and still move on to solve our massive problems? Or are the blind leading the blind -- over the cliff? This weekend on Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt talk about the psychological underpinnings of our contentious culture, why we can’t trust our own opinions, and the demonizing of our adversaries.“When it gets so that your opponents are not just people you disagree with, but… the mental state in which I am fighting for good, and you are fighting for evil, it's very difficult to compromise,” Haidt tells Moyers. “Compromise becomes a dirty word.”Also, a Bill Moyers essay on why Newt Gingrich might be afraid of Saul Alinsky.

Moyers & Company #103 "Why Are Big Banks Rewriting the Economy’s Rules?"Release Date: January 27, 2011Short: How power and influence helped big banks rewrite the rules of our economy. Next on Moyers & Company.Long: Big banks are rewriting the rules of our economy to the exclusive benefit of their own bottom line. But how did our political and financial class shift the benefits of the economy to the very top, while saddling us with greater debt and tearing new holes in the safety net? This weekend on Moyers & Company (check your local listings), Bill Moyers talks with former Citigroup Chairman John Reed and former Senator Byron Dorgan to explore a momentous instance: how the mid-90’s merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group – and a friendly Presidential pen -- brought down the Glass-Steagall Act, a crucial firewall between banks and investment firms which had protected consumers from financial calamity since the aftermath of the Great Depression. In effect, says Moyers, they put the watchdog to sleep.There’s no clearer example of the collusion between government and corporate finance than the Citicorp-Travelers merger, which -- thanks to the removal of Glass-Steagall -- enabled the formation of the financial behemoth known as Citigroup. But even behemoths are vulnerable; when the meltdown hit, the bank cut more than 50,000 jobs, and the taxpayers shelled out more than $45 billion to save it.Senator Dorgan tells Moyers, “If you were to rank big mistakes in the history of this country, that was one of the bigger ones because it has set back this country in a very significant way.”Now, John Reed regrets his role in the affair, and says lifting the Glass Steagall protections was a mistake. Given the 2008 meltdown, he’s surprised Wall Street still has so much power over Washington lawmakers. “I'm quite surprised the political establishment would listen to groups that have been so discredited,” Reed tells Moyers. “It wasn't that there was one or two or institutions that, you know, got carried away and did stupid things. It was, we all did… And then the whole system came down.”How Wall Street and Washington got together and stacked the deck against the rest of us. Next on Moyers & Company.

Moyers & Company #102 "David Stockman on Crony Capitalism"Release Date: January 20, 2012Short: Bill Moyers and former White House budget director David Stockman on the all-too-cozy relationship between Washington and Wall Street. Long: For years, high-ranking administration officials have spun through the revolving door between the White House and American big business. But how have they influenced the regulation of industries from which they came -- and American democracy as a result? This weekend, continuing our sharp multi-episode focus on the intersection of money and politics, Moyers & Company explores the tight connection between Wall Street and the White House with David Stockman, former budget director for President Reagan.Currently a businessman who says he was “taken to the woodshed” for telling the truth about the administration’s tax policies, Stockman speaks candidly with Bill Moyers about how money dominates politics, distorting free markets and endangering democracy. “As a result,” Stockman says, “we have neither capitalism nor democracy. We have crony capitalism.” Stockman shares details on how the courtship of politics and high finance have turned our economy into a private club that rewards the super-rich and corporations, leaving average Americans wondering how it could happen and who’s really in charge. “We now have an entitled class of Wall Street financiers and of corporate CEOs who believe the government is there to do… whatever it takes in order to keep the game going and their stock price moving upward,” Stockman tells Moyers.Also on the show, Moyers talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and columnist Gretchen Morgenson on how money and political clout enable industries to escape regulation and enrich executives at the top. Morgenson warned of Wall Street’s culpability in the widening income gap back in 2007 on Bill Moyers Journal.

Moyers & Company #101: “On Winner-Take-All Politics”Release Date: January 13, 2011Short: Bill Moyers explores how America's vast inequality didn't just happen, it's been politically engineered. Next on the premiere edition of Moyers & Company. Long: If you think America’s vast economic inequality – the gap between the richest Americans and everyone else – happened by accident, think again. On the premiere episode of Moyers & Company (check local listings), Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson -- "the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson of political science" -- delve into Winner-Take-All Politics, their book on "How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class." Says Moyers: “Their account is the best account I've seen of how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1% over everyone else, putting our once and future middle class in peril.” The show includes testimony of middle class Americans at a Senate hearing about the impact of hard times on families, as well as an essay on how Occupy Wall Street reflects a widespread belief that politics no longer works for ordinary people.

Uncovering the ways Washington helps the rich get richer. This week on Moyers & Company.